What do Gothic arches and steak tartare have in common?
Not a lot, except that they both got their name from a pseudo-historical connection.
The Goths, that is the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths who poured into Europe as the Roman Empire state was collapsing, are likely to have known and used the arch as an architectural feature, though there is little evidence of it. But that’s irrelevant.
The Tatars, that is the Turkic and Mongol peoples of the steppes reunited under Genghis Khan, also aimed at Europe (but not only), are likely to have seasoned their protein in sauce, but less likely to have preferred uncooked meat, though they must have enjoyed a good steak. That too is deliciously irrelevant.
Every generation attempts to denigrate and insult the age it believes it has outgrown, and the Renaissance was no exception, to put it politely. When Giorgio Vasari, of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects fame, wanted to express his contempt for medieval art that the Italian style believed was rebelling against, he picked the Goths as those responsible for the death of Rome and the advent of the medieval ‘order’. Gothic became shorthand for medieval, while both terms, Gothic and medieval, started their career as cultural insults in the hands of the Renaissance critic. Create market share by eviscerating your competition, nothing new under the Tuscan sun.
On the other hand, the Mongols fared a bit better, without the batter. Through mythological meanderings which shall forever remain clouded in steppe mist, the Tatars, later Tartars, became the focal point of a kind of concoction which transcended the purely sociocultural. Raw meat - and its proximate offspring the Tartar-style sauce or ‘sauce à la tartare’ - has zero documented connection with the Turkic conquerors, but in the world of socio-linguistics, the proof is rather in the pudding. And the negative press the Mongols got in Eastern Europe led to the old European belief that Tartar, or more accurately Tatar horsemen ate raw meat, supposedly tenderising it under their saddles during long rides, and by God they were long, even by modern airline standards. As a result, the steak tartar cured in its own cultural juice.
Next time you’re having a steak tartare or fish and chips with tartare sauce (if you’re desperate) outside a Gothic cathedral, remember that language, like love, has reasons that reason cannot understand, as Pascal would say.